Well, it has been a busy but lovely past week on the Arctic coast! We’re currently running about water quality sampling as part of our Golder contract. Part of this is sampling along the outlets for the lakes, which are usually marshy, twisty, and very buggy.Yesterday, we just couldn't face a 600 m trek across teh hummocky tundra, in our neoprene waders, carrying multitudes of heavy, irregularly shaped sampling equipment, from where the lake became too shallow for our motor. So, we paddled 'er in! We sang several happy voyageur songs...

We have had phenomenal weather for the past week – clear, sunny, and warm, with only a few showers or gusts. We even went skinny dipping in one of our lakes today. Heidi claims that she has never before seen such lovely days up here. [she took this picture of the Arctic Ocean and Roberts Bay, exclaiming "it has never been this nice and calm here in the history of the world". This prompts Kathryn to wonder if we are using up our entire season’s quota of nice days now, while we’re contracting, instead of having them for later, when we’re dragging 200 lb wagons across the tundra?

Other memorable moments lately have included when one of the helicopter pilots accidentally sent our boat out across the lake with the wind from his rotors (after he had dropped it there for us; it went sailing away, still wrapped in the transport webbing). Reactions on shore included panic, rage, disbelief, and hilarity as he (futilely) attempted to blow it back using his tail rotor. Kathryn has now adapted an age-old favourite humn:

Pierre, blow the boat ashore... Halleluja...

Perhaps it's the heat, but we've been coming up with a number of new filed songs. Today's most popular one was (to the tune of "I've got a lovely bunch of coconuts...")

I've got a lovely bunch of mosquitos
There they are, buzzing in my net
Big ones, small ones, some of them full of my blood....

Yeah. Well. It's hot. It's buggy.